The publication of Melissa Kearney’s book The Two-Parent Privilege is something of an event in policy circles. The economist and polymathic bibliophile Tyler Cowen surmised that it “could be the most important economics and policy book of this year.” Other blurbs from star economists David Autor and Larry Summers are no less admiring. It helps that Kearney is an MIT-educated economist, a chaired professor at the University of Maryland, and an affiliate scholar at the Brookings Institution with the kind of overflowing CV of which most graduate students can only dream.
Cowen calls The Two-Parent Privilege “a great book.” If that’s true, it’s not because it breaks new ground. Kearney’s book is a summary and synthesis—first-rate summary and synthesis, to be sure—of decades of research on the benefits of a childhood spent with both parents.
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